The popularity of personal computers has exploded in the past decade. Each year more and more people have used more and more personal computers in more and more ways. This rapid expansion in computer use has embraced the formation of on-line information sites on the World Wide Web. These Web sites not only have pictures and text, but may also include audio or video information available to the user or "surfer." World Wide Web sites are built for many different objectives, including advertising products and services to consumers, selling products and services directly to consumers, and distributing personal, corporate, and government information.
Each site on the World Wide Web is a construction of many different "pages" or documents, each written in HTML (hypertext markup language). The HTML page contains the text and formatting information for the page. An HTML document will typically have references, known as "links," to the locations of graphic images and other documents rather than include the images and other documents directly in the HTML document itself. Every document in the system or in the network, has its own unique address. When "visiting" a Web page or site, the user's Web browser requests and fetches the HTML document from the Web. The browser recognizes links to images and other documents and then retrieves them. The browser then fills the screen with the images and text according to the formatting information. Thus, documents can be linked to each other by specifying, in HTML, the addresses of the desired documents. This ability to link documents, thus enabling movement from any one document to another, is one of the great benefits of the World Wide Web. However, this ability can also be counteractive if attempting to provide a menu system that renders a very concise and structured set of transactions to a user.
A menu system is a set of transactions which are presented in a very hierarchical format. However, it is relatively easy to defeat the format, since the Web provides `random` access to any of those documents at any point in the format, just by maintaining that link, i.e. by saving that link in the Web browser the user could jump back to the middle of the format. Specifically, a user is not forced to enter an HTML document or series of documents in any particular form. Banking transactions represent an exemplary case for exhibiting the extent of problems that can occur when using Web sites. Ideally, a customer (or user) would enter through a set of security screens, and enter an account number and a security number like a PIN. If the security transactions were successful, then and only then, is the user allowed to proceed into the next page, and be presented with a set of options for home banking. That set of options would contain hypertext links to other documents, these other documents may provide more details about the type of transaction.
As the Web system exists today, someone using a Web browser could save the address of one of those downstream documents. The user could then jump right back to one of those documents, thereby bypassing the security screens. A known solution to this dilemma is to use security flags, which are set as the user goes through the security screens. However, this solution does not allow for elegant navigation of the Web site application. Moreover, it allows the users to fumble around inside of the application and get confused. Another disadvantage is that the solution would increase traffic that is non-productive and unusable, by accessing the document application out of sequence.